The House of Lords has set up a special committee to assess the UK’s digital competitiveness. The House of Lords Committee on Digital Skills will focus on assessing the digital capability of the nation at a time when enterprise adoption of cloud services is steadily increasing, creating demand for skills around cloud, mobility and cybersecurity.

The majority of UK IT departments are struggling to keep up with the needs of their businesses, with dependence on ageing legacy infrastructure, slimming budgets and lack of skilled personnel playing leading roles in holding them back, according to a survey of over 250 CIOs and IT heads published Tuesday.

Scabal, a Brussels-based luxury clothing designer whose threads have been donned by the likes of Daniel Craig and David Beckham recently embarked on an ambitious cloud migration project, moving all of the company’s IT infrastructure including voice communications over to Interoute’s cloud platform. Jose Largo, the company’s IT director leading the migration says that the project will help make Scabal more flexible as it grows – and completely change the nature of its IT department in the process.

With cloud-based technologies beginning to reach a critical mass in terms of penetration in UK businesses a study published this week suggests that skills in cloud computing top the list of desirable attributes for IT professionals in the UK, followed closely by security.

There are two sides to the cloud coin: one positive, the other negative, and too many people focus on one at the expense of the other for a variety of reasons ranging from ignorance to wilful misdirection. But ultimately, success resides in embracing both sides and pulling together the capabilities of both enterprises and their suppliers to make the most of the positive and limit the negative.

You don’t have to watch the latest ‘Avengers’ film to get the sense the storage and computational requirements of film and television production are continuing their steady increase. But Guillaume Aubichon, chief technology officer of post-production and visual effects firm DigitalFilm Tree (DFT) says production and post-production outfits may find use in the latest and greatest in open source cloud technologies to help plug the growing gap between technical needs and capabilities – and unlock new possibilities for the medium in the process.